Boy Swallows Universe

by Trent Dalton

  ‘So he’s not expecting you?’ she replies.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What were you hoping to see him about?’ the woman asks.

  ‘I would like to apply for a cadetship on his fine and influential newspaper.’

  ‘Sorry,’ the woman with the orange hoop earrings says, returning her eyes to a logbook filled with names and dates and signatures. ‘Cadet applications closed two months ago. We’re not taking any more juniors on until November next year.’

  ‘But, but . . .’ But what, Eli?

  ‘But what?’ the woman asks.

  ‘But I’m special.’

  ‘What?’ the woman howls. ‘Come again?’

  You dickhead, Eli Bell. Breathe. Rephrase.

  ‘Well, I feel like I could do some great things for his newspaper,’ I say.

  ‘Because you’re special?’

  No, I’m not special. I’m just fucking crazy.

  ‘Well, I’m not really special,’ I say. ‘Just keen. And different. I’m different.’

  ‘How sweet,’ the woman says sarcastically. She looks at a glass security door between the building’s foyer and the wider bowels of the editorial floor from where I can almost smell the ink on the thumbs of sub-editors and the cigarettes in the ashtrays of the racing writers and the Scotch in the glasses of the political journalists and I can hear the sound of history being typed by men and women who don’t know how to touch-type because they have no sense of touch, they only have a sense of smell, a sense for sniffing out a yarn. ‘But different won’t get you through that security door, I’m afraid,’ she says.

  ‘What will get me through that door?’

  ‘Patience and time,’ the woman says.

  ‘But I’ve done my time.’

  ‘You have?’ the woman laughs. ‘What are you, sixteen? Seventeen?’

  ‘I’m almost seventeen.’

  ‘Old-timer, then,’ she says. ‘You still in school?’

  ‘Yeah, but my soul graduated years ago.’

  I lean in to the long counter she stands behind.

  ‘Look, truth is, I’ve got a story for him,’ I say. ‘And once he hears this story he’ll know I’m different from all the other applicants and he’ll want to give me a shot.’

  The woman with the orange hoop earrings rolls her eyes and smiles, puts her pen down on her logbook.

  ‘What’s your name, kid?’ she asks.

  ‘Eli Bell.’

  ‘Look, Eli Bell, you’re not gettin’ through that door today,’ she says. She looks up at the glass entry door to this foyer, leans in to the counter to whisper to me. ‘But I can’t stop you from sitting out near that hedge over there at around 8 p.m. tonight,’ she says.

  ‘What happens at 8 p.m.?’ I ask.

  ‘Jesus, mate, you are special,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘It’s when the boss goes home, ya goose.’

  ‘Riiiiiiight!’ I whisper. ‘Thank you. Just one more thing, what does the boss look like?’

  She doesn’t take her eyes off me.

  ‘See those three framed photographs of the three serious and sour-lookin’ men on the wall behind my left shoulder?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘He’s the bloke in the middle.’

  *

  Brian Robertson exits the building at 9.16 p.m. He looks younger in the photo above the counter in the foyer. His hair is greying on the sides of his scalp and these greys rise to thinning ash-coloured curls on top of his head. His reading glasses hang from a cord around his neck. A navy blue wool vest over a white business shirt. He carries a brown leather briefcase in his right hand, three broadsheet newspapers tucked under his left arm. There’s a toughness in his face, a hardness. He looks like one of the old rugby league players from the early 1900s that I saw in some of Dad’s old Australian rugby league books, a face from the days when men juggled representative football commitments with battles on the Western Front. He pads down the three small steps from the building’s entry and I emerge from the darkened hedge where I’ve sat and meandered around like a stalker for the past six hours.

  ‘Mr Robertson?’

  He stops.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you, but I wanted to introduce myself.’

  He scans me up and down.

  ‘How long have you been sitting out here for?’ he grumbles.

  ‘Six hours, sir.’

  ‘That was foolish.’

  He turns and walks on towards the building’s car park.

  I skip two paces to catch up with him.

  ‘I’ve read your newspaper since I was eight years old,’ I say.

  ‘So since last year?’ he replies, eyes ahead.

  ‘Ha!’ I laugh, pacing sideways to capture his gaze. ‘That’s funny. Umm, I wanted to see if you would . . .’

  ‘Where did you get that tie from?’ he asks, eyes still ahead.

  He looked at me for maybe half a second and he caught the detail of my tie. The guy sees details. Journalists see details.

  ‘My Dad got it from St Vinnies.’

  He nods.

  ‘You ever hear about the Narela Street Massacre?’ he asks.

  I shake my head. He walks hard as he tells his story.

  ‘Cannon Hill, eastern Brisbane, 1957, bloke named Marian Majka, Polish immigrant, mid-thirties, kills his wife and his five-year-old daughter with a knife and a hammer. He sets fire to his house then walks on over to the house opposite his. Kills the mum in that house too, along with her two daughters. Then he starts piling all the dead bodies up because he’s gonna set them all alight and this little girl from the neighbourhood – ten-year-old girl named Lynette Karger – knocks on the door. She’s come to pick up her friends to go to school like she does every other day. And Majka kills her too and adds her body to the pile and sets it alight. He then shoots himself and the cops arrive to see the horror show. Little Lynette still had her school lunch money clutched in her hand.’

  ‘Jesus,’ I gasp.

  ‘I turned up to the house that morning to report on it all,’ he says. ‘I saw that whole sick mess up close.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Yep,’ he says, walking hard. ‘And still I haven’t seen anything more disturbing than that tie you’re wearing.’

  He walks on.

  ‘It’s all the letters of the alphabet,’ I say. ‘I was hoping it would appeal to your love of words.’

  ‘Love of words?’ he echoes. He stops on the spot. ‘What makes you think I love words? I hate words. I despise them. Words are all I ever see. Words haunt me in my sleep. Words get beneath my skin and they creep into my mind when I’m having a warm bath and they infest my nervous system when I’m at my granddaughter’s christening when I should be thinking about her precious face but I’m thinking about the fucking words in tomorrow’s page-one headline.’

  He’s clenching his fist and he doesn’t realise it until he walks on further to the car park. I lay my cards down.

  ‘I was hoping you would consider me for one of your cadetships?’

  ‘Not possible,’ he barks, cutting me off. ‘We’ve picked our cadets for the foreseeable future.’

  ‘I know, but I think I have something to offer you that others can’t.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, such as?’

  ‘A page-one story,’ I say.

  He stops.

  ‘A page-one story?’ he smiles. ‘Okay, let’s hear it.’

  ‘Well, it’s complicated,’ I say.

  He walks away immediately.

  ‘Too bad,’ he says.

  I catch up with him again.

  ‘Well, it’s a little hard to explain it all to you right here as you’re walking to your car.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ he says. ‘Cook Finds Australia. Hitler Invades Poland. Oswald Kills Kennedy. Man Conquers Moon. They were complicated stories too. You’ve already wasted too many of your beloved words kissing my arse so I’ll let you have just three more. Tell me your story in three words.’


  Think Eli. Three words. Think. But my mind is blank. I see only his sour face and nothing else in my mind. My story in three words. Just three words.

  Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  ‘I can’t,’ I say.

  ‘That’s two,’ he says.

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘That’s three,’ he says. ‘Sorry, kid. You’re welcome to apply next year.’

  And he walks away, up the driveway into a shed filled with expensive automobiles.

  *

  I will remember this sinking feeling through the colour of the moon tonight. It’s orange, a crescent sliver up there like a wedge of rockmelon. I will remember these failures and letdowns and hopeless cases through the graffiti on the concrete wall opposite platform 4 of Bowen Hills train station. Someone has spray-painted an image of a large throbbing penis but the penis’s knob end is an impressive image of earth spinning beneath the words: Don’t fuck the world! On a long maroon platform seat I loosen my strangling tie and study the letters of the alphabet, trying to find three words to tell my story. Eli Misses Opportunity. Eli Fucks Up. Eli Fucks World. I’m lost in the letters of this horrific tie.

  Then a voice from the other end of my platform seat.

  ‘Eli Bell.’

  I follow the voice and I find her. We’re the only two people on the platform. We’re the only two people on earth.

  ‘Caitlyn Spies,’ I say.

  She laughs.

  ‘It’s you,’ I say.

  There’s something too strong and wonder-filled in my stupid, open-mouthed, jaw-dropped gasping.

  ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘It’s me.’

  She wears a long black coat and her long brown hair falls over her shoulders. Dr Martens boots. The cool air seems to make her pale face glow. Caitlyn Spies glows. Maybe that’s how she draws all those prized story sources to her. Maybe that’s how she gets them to open up and spill their inner psychological beans. She mesmerises them in her glow. In her fire.

  ‘You remember me?’ I say.

  She nods.

  ‘I do,’ she smiles. ‘And I don’t know why. I always forget a face.’

  A loud train rattles in to platform 4 in front of us.

  ‘I see your face every day,’ I say.

  She can’t hear that over the train noise.

  ‘Sorry? What was that?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  Caitlyn stands, gripping the strap of a brown leather satchel over her right shoulder.

  ‘You on this one?’ she asks.

  ‘Where’s it going?’

  ‘Caboolture.’

  ‘I’m . . . ummm . . . yeah. This is my train.’

  Caitlyn smiles, studies my face. She yanks on the silver handle of a middle carriage door and steps into the train. It’s empty. Only us two on the train. Only us two in the universe.

  She sits in a four-seat bay, two empty seats facing two empty seats.

  ‘May I sit here with you?’ I ask.

  ‘You may,’ she says, adopting a regal voice, laughing.

  The train pulls away from Bowen Hills station.

  ‘What are you doing in Bowen Hills?’ she asks.

  ‘I was meeting your boss, Brian Robertson, about a cadetship,’ I say.

  ‘Seriously?’ she replies.

  ‘Seriously.’

  ‘You had a meeting with Brian?’

  ‘Well, not a meeting exactly,’ I say. ‘I hid behind a hedge for six hours and approached him when he was exiting the building at 9.16 p.m.’

  She rolls her head back, laughing.

  ‘And how did that go for you?’ she asks.

  ‘Not so great.’

  She nods sympathetically.

  ‘I remember thinking there might be a teddy bear heart beneath that monster exterior when I first met Brian,’ Caitlyn says. ‘There’s not. It’s just another monster inside biting the head off a teddy bear. But he really is the best newspaper editor in the country.’

  I nod, stare out the window as the train passes the old Albion flour mill.

  ‘You want to be a journalist?’ she asks.

  ‘I want to do what you do, write about crime and what makes criminals tick.’

  ‘That’s right,’ she says. ‘You knew Slim Halliday.’

  I nod.

  ‘You gave me a name,’ she says. ‘I looked him up. The limbs guy.’

  ‘Tytus Broz.’

  ‘Tytus Broz, yes,’ she says. ‘I remember you were telling me a story about him and then you rushed off. Why’d you take off so fast that day?’

  ‘I had to go see my mum urgently.’

  ‘Was she all right?’

  ‘Not really,’ I say. ‘But she was all right once I saw her. That’s nice of you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Asking that little question about my mum like that, that’s nice. I guess you learn that as a journalist after a while.’

  ‘Learn what?’

  ‘Asking the nice little questions in between the big important questions. I reckon that would make people feel better when they’re talking to you.’

  ‘I guess so,’ she says. ‘You know, I ended up doing some digging on your limbs guy, Tytus Broz.’

  ‘You find anything?’

  ‘I phoned a few people. Everybody said he was the kindest bloke in the south-west suburbs. Honest as they come, everybody said. Generous. Gives to charity. He’s an advocate for the disabled. I called a few cops I knew back then in Moorooka. They said he was a pillar of the community.’

  ‘Of course they said that,’ I say. ‘The cops are the greatest beneficiaries of his charitable soul.’

  I look up at that orange crescent moon.

  ‘Tytus Broz is a bad man doing very bad things,’ I say. ‘That artificial limb business is a front for one of the biggest heroin importation syndicates in south-east Queensland.’

  ‘You got any proof of this, Eli Bell?’

  ‘My story is my proof.’

  And a missing lucky fucking finger if I can ever fucking find it.

  ‘You told anyone your story yet?’

  ‘No, I was going to tell your boss but he insisted I tell him the whole story in three words.’

  She laughs.

  ‘He does that,’ she says. ‘He put me on the spot with that in my job interview. He asked me to encapsulate my whole life up to that point and everything I believe in into a three-word headline.’

  Caitlyn Is Beauty. Caitlyn Is Truth. Caitlyn Is Here.

  ‘What did you say?’ I ask.

  ‘It was dumb, just the first stupid thing that came to my head.’

  ‘What was that?’

  She cringes.

  ‘Spies Digs Deep.’

  And for the next eight stops along the Caboolture line she tells me why that headline works for her life story. She tells me how she wasn’t supposed to survive her birth because she was born not much bigger than a can of Pasito. But her mum died giving birth to her instead and she always felt that was some divine deal her mum made, life for life, and the knowledge of that trade-off plagued her from the start. She could never be lazy. She could never switch off. She could never give up, even in her teens when she went through a Goth phase and she hated her life and she wanted to fuck the world like that hilarious earth knob graffiti she sees every night she takes the train home from Bowen Hills train station. Because her mum didn’t die for her daughter to give a half-arsed effort. So Spies dug deep. Always. In sports carnivals at high school. In social netball games where she’s way too competitive and the umpire is always barking ‘CONTACT!’ at her when she elbows her rival wing attack. Spies Digs Deep. And she tells herself that when she’s working the phones on her stories. She says those three words now like a stupid self-help book mantra. Spies Digs Deep. Spies Digs Deep. And she’s said it so many times now it’s become her blessing and her curse. She digs too deep with people. Looks for their faults instead of their virtues. She never really had the right boyfriend at university or any other time and she doesn�
��t see herself finding anyone really right for her in the future because Spies Digs Deep.

  ‘Oh fuck, see,’ she says. ‘I’m going way too deep now.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ I say. ‘What do you think you’re actually digging for?’

  She thinks on this for a moment, playing with the cuff on her coat.

  ‘That’s a nice little in-between question there, Eli,’ she smiles. ‘I don’t know. Probably just why? Why am I here and she’s not? Why is she not here when all those rapists and murderers and thieves and frauds I write about every day get to live and breathe in perfect health?’

  She shakes her head, snaps out of her line of thinking.

  ‘C’mon,’ she says, ‘gimme three words for the life story of Eli Bell?’

  Boy Sees Future. Boy Sees Her. Boy Digs Deep.

  ‘I can’t think of anything,’ I say.

  Her eyelids close in, probing. ‘Why don’t I believe you, Eli Bell?’ she replies. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised at all if your greatest problem is actually thinking too many things.’

  The train slows. She looks out the window. There’s nobody out there. Not a soul on earth. Just the night.

  ‘This next stop is mine,’ she says.

  I nod. She studies my face.

  ‘This wasn’t your train, was it?’ she says.

  I shake my head. ‘No, this wasn’t my train,’ I say.

  ‘So why’d you get on this train?’ she asks.

  ‘I wanted to keep talking with you.’

  ‘Well, I hope the conversation was worth the long trip home for you.’

  ‘It was,’ I say. ‘You want to know the truth?’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘I woulda hopped on a train to Perth just to hear you talk for thirty minutes.’

  She smiles. Drops her head, shaking it.

  ‘You’re a ham, Eli Bell,’ she says.

  ‘Huh? A ham? What does that mean?’

  ‘You’re over the top.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with ham?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she says. ‘Don’t worry, you’re a sweet ham.’

  ‘Honey leg ham?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Something like that.’

  She stares into my eyes. I’m lost in the fire of her.

  ‘Where did you come from, Eli Bell?’ she ponders mystically.

  ‘Bracken Ridge.’